On Bad Writing

In between the days and weeks spent vacillating between being convinced that I'll be summarily rejected from every school I applied to and wondering which campus would be more picturesque, a more satisfying experience, I managed to (briefly) distract myself from the worries of waiting when I stumbled on some of my old writing. Really old writing. The stuff I had written as parts of exercises for my very first Creative Writing class ever, in college. Also some stuff I had written outside of class, but sadly, no less painful to read. Oh, and 60-70 pages worth of junk written for the National Writing Month of November. What did I do with this bounty of writing? I read it.

What's the point of all this? First, never throw (or delete) anything away. What may not save you from embarrassment will surely more than make up in hilarity years down the road. Second, reading the stuff I wrote four, five years ago is highly informative. It's so easy to see all the mistakes, the cliches, the false starts, the corny endings I had used ad-naseum in those stories. It also brings me back to my old processes as a writer. I suddenly remember where I wrote this story, why I wrote that story, how I came to this idea or that. To me, it's incredibly informative, because it shows me where I have come from and how I came to be where I am, and in some ways, reminds me how to capture the naive, childish passions that made me excited to write in the first place. Finally, it also serves as a reminder as to how far I've come as a writer and how incredibly far I still have to go.

But it's also a fun ride, if you can weather, even find amusement in the truly cringe-worthy examples. Here are some choice bits of some of the stuff I wrote in college:

"...It was as if I was being torn from two unseen forces. One was pulling me to pound on the door, to see what lay behind it for me. The other pulled me in the opposite direction, pleading my to save my soul, to run away like a coward but to live to fight another day..."

Poorly written and over-dramatic much? Brings chills of embarrassment down my spine. Here's another gem:

"...Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and armed with a Masters in Computer Avionics, Rice felt like he could change the world for the better..."

Yes. The main character's name was Rice, as in the grain. Ah well. They can't all be winners.